As citizens of a dangerous world, we all face security and safety risks. Every day, 30 people die by gunshot in the U.S.—one every 48 minutes. A police officer dies from a gunshot wound every ten days. An intelligent security and surveillance system may save lives. Unfortunately, if criminals know the existence of a video surveillance system, the first thing they will do is attempt to cut the lead to the cameras, servers, storage, and/or other system components, destroy system components, interfere or otherwise make portions of the system dysfunctional.
A recently foiled terrorist attack on Ft. Dix Army Base in New Jersey involved five terrorists planning to kill U.S. soldiers at the army base. They were observed by gate personnel and in video cameras surveying the army base on numerous occasions prior to the planned attack. A well-meaning citizen notified the police and FBI by submitting a “video tip” which started an investigation. The video tip included information and a video of the men training for the terrorist attack and plotting to kill as many American soldiers in as short a time as possible. During the Rodney King beatings in 1992, a bystander videotaped the police brutality and submitted the video to the courts. Girls bullying other girls in school have been recorded on camera phones and the videos were submitted to school administrators, which started an investigation. Citizens are submitting tips containing multimedia information to the police, but this information is not correlated with other events, indexed, or archived. Accordingly, an intelligent security and surveillance system utilizing tips containing multimedia information may help solve crime and prevent terrorist activity. Unfortunately, if criminals or terrorists know of the existence of a “video tip” line, they will attempt to fool, flood the system with numerous fake, superfluous, or distracting video tips, or otherwise make the system ineffective.
Vandalism and damage to property decreases property values. One study conducted by the London School of Economics found that “a one-tenth standard deviation increase in the recorded density of incidents of criminal damage has a capitalized cost of just under 1% of property values, or £2,200 on the average Inner London property” (Steve Gibbons, The Costs of Urban Property Crime, 2003). An intelligent security and surveillance system may prevent such vandalism. Unfortunately, monitoring and storing data from numerous surveillance cameras consumes a very large amount of storage.
Every year from 1996-2005, over a million motor vehicles were stolen every year. That corresponds to one car stolen every 26 seconds somewhere in the United States. In 2004, the value of stolen motor vehicles was $7.6 billion and only 13% of thefts were cleared by arrests (FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 2006). An intelligent security, surveillance, storage, and alerting system may help prevent stolen cars, and may identify stolen vehicles and hence aide in the apprehension of car thieves. Unfortunately, no existing surveillance system has the intelligence to correlate information about vehicles or has the connectivity to FBI, Interpol, state, or local law enforcement databases.
Violence in schools and on college campuses continues to rise, and has increased concern among students, parents, and teachers. A shooting at Virginia Tech University in 2007 resulted in the killing of 32 people and injured 24 others. In 2005, a professor at MIT was shot four times in a parking lot on MIT's campus. In September 2007, two students were shot by a fellow student at the Delaware State University. Shootings on college campuses are increasingly becoming a common concern. An intelligent security and surveillance system on college campuses may thwart future shootings. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art gunshot detection systems are not connected intelligently to video surveillance systems, to tip information, or to other data from legacy systems.
Therefore, as recognized by the present inventors, what are needed are a method, apparatus, and system of alerting that weights input data from disparate systems to lower false alarm rates and to filter out unwanted, spurious, or intentionally distracting information.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.